Education for a Digital World Advice, Guidelines and Effective Practice from Around Globe, 2008a

21 – Media Selection
hension problems. Also, keep sentences short. As a rule,
as sentence length increases, comprehension decreases.
Practical Guideline
Text should be short, clear, concise, and simple.
Keep paragraphs short enough to break up large
chunks of information into manageable pieces. This is
also useful for enabling the material to fit onto computer
screens. Short paragraphs also help learners who are
choosing to skim the material. Short paragraphs also
increase the amount of white space.
Minimize reading
It is important for you to minimize reading since it is
generally more tiring and time-consuming to read from
computer screens than printed material. People tend to
read printed material 20 to 30 percent faster than the
same content on a computer screen. Minimizing reading
also helps students with weak reading abilities and those
with disabilities. Minimizing reading makes writing for
computer screens fundamentally different from writing
for printed materials. Be sure that you have this skill or
that it is available on the team.
There are a number of ways you can minimize reading:
• Use simple and clear wording.
– Students with better reading abilities usually do
not find simple clear writing offending. They simply
read it faster.
– Highlight key words. This makes important information
easy to find.
• Ensure smoothness.
– Read the text aloud to hear if it flows smoothly.
• Be consistent.
– Keep screens predictable and regular to minimize
searching. There should be a clear underlying
structure. Facilitate this with organizational landmarks
such as headings.
– Use a standardized and consistent “template” to
format your pages.
• Use tables to organize information.
– This makes the information easy to find and understand.
• Use lists instead of paragraphs.
– This makes the information easy to find and understand.
– List items should follow the same grammatical
structure.
– Highlight lists with bullets or dashes.
– Make lists clear by creating logical groupings.
• Use flow charts and diagrams where possible to illustrate
your points.
Develop a good writing style
Your writing style should follow these guidelines:
• Use active verbs, and eliminate unnecessary words.
– For example, write “Your software choice will affect
your efficiency” rather than “Your efficiency
will be impacted by your choice of software”.
Similarly, write “text colour”, not “colour of the
text”.
• Keep your writing natural and conversational. Address
your reader directly by using the second-person
voice (e.g., “you”).
– Vary sentence lengths. Note that this page has a
variety of sentence lengths.
– Begin sentences in a number of different ways.
– Use effective connecting techniques. For example,
start succeeding sentences with “However” or “Similarly”
or include key words of the preceding sentence.
– Use many common one or two syllable words.
– Include colloquial and idiomatic expressions (but
be sure the audience will understand them).
– Use a minimal amount of abbreviations, proper
nouns, and numerals.
• Use the second person (i.e., you rather than we).
• Be unbiased.
– Eliminate sexist, stereotypic, ethnic, and lifestyle
comments (see Chapter 4, Addressing Diversity).
Follow the basic rules of writing
You need to follow the many rules of effective writing.
Some of these rules include:
• Use correct writing mechanics (e.g., spelling, grammar,
and punctuation).
– Errors affect credibility, lead students to take the material
less seriously, and can teach poor writing habits.
– Use a spell-check program but remember that spellcheckers
might not consider sentence context and
meaning.
• Avoid hyphenating words at the end of lines.
– Hyphenated text is harder to read.
• Define all acronyms on first usage.
– For the first instance, write the full term and then
put the initialism in brackets. For example, write
Computer-based Training (CBT). Repeat the full
term if it has not been used for several pages.
• Minimize punctuation. For example, in acronyms use
CBT not C.B.T.
• Use upper and lower case letters.
324 Education for a Digital World